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Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims
Jon Sobrino continues the magisterial christology begun in Jesus the Liberator. In that book Sobrino examined the identity of Jesus in relation to his message, his interlocutors, and the conflict that led to his death. In this second volume he takes up the Resurrection of Christ, the christology of the New Testament, and finally the christological formulae of the early church councils. Throughout Christ the Liberator Sobrino writes from the reality of faith, as set in motion by the event of Jesus Christ, and from the situation of the victims -- the "Crucified People" of history -- particularly the poor of El Salvador, with whom he works. With Christ the Liberator Sobrino's christology takes its place among the most significant contributions of Latin America to the church and theology today.
376 pages, Paperback
First published June 6, 2001
About the author
Jon Sobrino
93 books35 followersJon Sobrino, S.J. is a Jesuit Catholic priest and theologian, known mostly for his contributions to liberation theology.
He received worldwide attention in 2007 when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a Notification for what they see as doctrines which are "erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful."
Life
Born into a Basque family in Barcelona, Sobrino entered the Jesuit Order when he was 18. The following year, in 1958, he was sent to El Salvador. He later studied engineering at St. Louis University, a Jesuit University, in the United States and then theology in Frankfurt in West Germany. Returning to El Salvador, he taught at the Jesuit-run University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, which he helped to found.
On November 16, 1989 he narrowly escaped being assassinated by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army. By a coincidence, he was away from El Salvador when members of the military broke into the rectory at the UCA and brutally murdered his six fellow Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuría, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Ignacio Martin Baro, Amando López, and Joaquín López y López, and their housekeeper Elba Ramos and her 15-year old daughter Celina Ramos. The Jesuits were targeted for their outspoken work to bring about resolution to the brutal El Salvador Civil War that left about 75,000 men, women, and children dead, in the great majority civilians.
Investigated by the Vatican throughout his career as a professor of theology, he has remained an outspoken proponent of peace, joining protests in 2008 of the continued training of Latin American military officers in torture techniques at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, GA.
Works
Sobrino's main works are Jesus the Liberator (1991) and its sequel, Christ the Liberator (1999), along with Christology at the Crossroads (1978), The True Church and the Poor (1984), Spirituality of Liberation (1990), The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Orbis, 1994), No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays (Orbis, 2008). See also Stephen J. Pope (ed), Hope and Solidarity: Jon Sobrino's Challenge to Christian Theology (Orbis, 2008).
He received worldwide attention in 2007 when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a Notification for what they see as doctrines which are "erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful."
Life
Born into a Basque family in Barcelona, Sobrino entered the Jesuit Order when he was 18. The following year, in 1958, he was sent to El Salvador. He later studied engineering at St. Louis University, a Jesuit University, in the United States and then theology in Frankfurt in West Germany. Returning to El Salvador, he taught at the Jesuit-run University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, which he helped to found.
On November 16, 1989 he narrowly escaped being assassinated by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army. By a coincidence, he was away from El Salvador when members of the military broke into the rectory at the UCA and brutally murdered his six fellow Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuría, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Ignacio Martin Baro, Amando López, and Joaquín López y López, and their housekeeper Elba Ramos and her 15-year old daughter Celina Ramos. The Jesuits were targeted for their outspoken work to bring about resolution to the brutal El Salvador Civil War that left about 75,000 men, women, and children dead, in the great majority civilians.
Investigated by the Vatican throughout his career as a professor of theology, he has remained an outspoken proponent of peace, joining protests in 2008 of the continued training of Latin American military officers in torture techniques at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, GA.
Works
Sobrino's main works are Jesus the Liberator (1991) and its sequel, Christ the Liberator (1999), along with Christology at the Crossroads (1978), The True Church and the Poor (1984), Spirituality of Liberation (1990), The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Orbis, 1994), No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays (Orbis, 2008). See also Stephen J. Pope (ed), Hope and Solidarity: Jon Sobrino's Challenge to Christian Theology (Orbis, 2008).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 9, 2011
Jon Sobrino's poignant argument for a cogent christology that does justice to the 2/3 of the world that live the reality of victimization and abject poverty deserves to be read by all ministers and committed Christians. It is simply that good. Recognizing that the world is fundamentally divided into two types of people - "those who can take life for granted and those who can't" - Sobrino brings the full weight of theological methodology to bear on the reality of what Jesus Christ can possibly mean in a world where most humans endure deep-seated structural oppression as a daily occurence. Key to this effort is the articulation of the experience of the resurrection of Jesus in the tradition of Christianity with a "view to the victims," so that traditional christological and soteriological dogmas might "give up" more of their truth.
With arguments rooted in the history of the development of texts in the NT and the early church, along with the application of hermeneutical principles related to the reading of this history, Sobrino argues in the first part of his book that the experience of the resurrection of Jesus is not simply that of any dead person come to life again, but is specifically the divine vindication of a Victim, and, in particular, a Victim of the capital punishment of his day. God didn't just raise anyone from the dead; God raised Jesus, the Crucified One, from the dead. The reality of Jesus as liberated victim runs through his entire theology and is an expansion on themes begun in Sobriono's earlier work "Jesus the Liberator." Another core aspect of Sobrino's thesis is that historical circumstances led to the formulation of doctrines about the reality of Christ that gradually moved the chuch away from a theological expression that gave full voice to the New Testament links between Jesus the Christ as Son of God and Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God. In other words, the Mediator became that which was also Mediated, and Jesus Christ and God's Kingdom became separated in the history of theology. Sobrino views this as an inevitable historical reality, but one that can be revisited and transformed into something more.
The second part of the work involves an interpretation of the titles of Jesus as these are found in the New Testament to the reality of Christ as liberator of victims. The chapter disclosing the historical meaning of the title High Priest on Jesus (as it is expressed in the Letter to the Hebrews) is worth the entire book, but his explication (among others) of the relationship between the titles Son of Man and Son of God and Servant of Yaheweh is also informative and well done.
For the most part, the first two section of the book are recapitulations of the thoughts of others, but applied in a very creative way. (Note that throughout, the footnotes Sobrino provides are extensive and well researched.) It is section three that represents a supremely creative contribution - the application of the reality of victims to the christological controversies of the third and fourth centuries. If nothing else, Sobrino's faithfulness to Nicea and Chalcedon come out most strongly here, even as he recognizes that the traditional language can conceal as much as it can reveal about the fact that Jesus, in order to be truly Christ, and to be good news to victims must be truly God and truly human, but must also be (and is) "the true human." His interweaving of the realities of orthodoxy (right praise leading to right belief), orthopraxis (right actino) and orthopathy (the right "pathos" or manner of being) which emerges from a combined reading of the New Testament and the traditional definitions is both deft and faithful to the full tradition of the church.
Contrary to some charges made against him, Sobrino does not engage in an historical reductionism or seek to question or eclipse the truth of the traditional christological doctrines of Nicea or Chalcedon. He seeks to apply a particular hermeneutic to them so that they can find new life in the reality of victims that is part of the suffering of much of the world today, particularly his own El Salvador, and, in a wider sense, Latin America, and, still wider, the Underdeveloped World. This book, while dense and highly scholarly, has much to offer theologians, students of theology (and not just liberation theology), and anyone who takes the claims of justice as a core Christian value seriously.
With arguments rooted in the history of the development of texts in the NT and the early church, along with the application of hermeneutical principles related to the reading of this history, Sobrino argues in the first part of his book that the experience of the resurrection of Jesus is not simply that of any dead person come to life again, but is specifically the divine vindication of a Victim, and, in particular, a Victim of the capital punishment of his day. God didn't just raise anyone from the dead; God raised Jesus, the Crucified One, from the dead. The reality of Jesus as liberated victim runs through his entire theology and is an expansion on themes begun in Sobriono's earlier work "Jesus the Liberator." Another core aspect of Sobrino's thesis is that historical circumstances led to the formulation of doctrines about the reality of Christ that gradually moved the chuch away from a theological expression that gave full voice to the New Testament links between Jesus the Christ as Son of God and Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God. In other words, the Mediator became that which was also Mediated, and Jesus Christ and God's Kingdom became separated in the history of theology. Sobrino views this as an inevitable historical reality, but one that can be revisited and transformed into something more.
The second part of the work involves an interpretation of the titles of Jesus as these are found in the New Testament to the reality of Christ as liberator of victims. The chapter disclosing the historical meaning of the title High Priest on Jesus (as it is expressed in the Letter to the Hebrews) is worth the entire book, but his explication (among others) of the relationship between the titles Son of Man and Son of God and Servant of Yaheweh is also informative and well done.
For the most part, the first two section of the book are recapitulations of the thoughts of others, but applied in a very creative way. (Note that throughout, the footnotes Sobrino provides are extensive and well researched.) It is section three that represents a supremely creative contribution - the application of the reality of victims to the christological controversies of the third and fourth centuries. If nothing else, Sobrino's faithfulness to Nicea and Chalcedon come out most strongly here, even as he recognizes that the traditional language can conceal as much as it can reveal about the fact that Jesus, in order to be truly Christ, and to be good news to victims must be truly God and truly human, but must also be (and is) "the true human." His interweaving of the realities of orthodoxy (right praise leading to right belief), orthopraxis (right actino) and orthopathy (the right "pathos" or manner of being) which emerges from a combined reading of the New Testament and the traditional definitions is both deft and faithful to the full tradition of the church.
Contrary to some charges made against him, Sobrino does not engage in an historical reductionism or seek to question or eclipse the truth of the traditional christological doctrines of Nicea or Chalcedon. He seeks to apply a particular hermeneutic to them so that they can find new life in the reality of victims that is part of the suffering of much of the world today, particularly his own El Salvador, and, in a wider sense, Latin America, and, still wider, the Underdeveloped World. This book, while dense and highly scholarly, has much to offer theologians, students of theology (and not just liberation theology), and anyone who takes the claims of justice as a core Christian value seriously.
July 4, 2026
Jon Sobrino’s second book in his duology covering Christology from the perspective of liberation theology is a tour de force. Where the first book covered the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the second book focuses on Christ’s resurrection, the Christology of the New Testament (specifically the titles given to Jesus), and the theology and definitions produced by the early councils. As in his first book, Sobrino consistently centers the suffering victims of history in his analysis, skillfully maintaining a delicate throughline while exploring a wide range of material and topics in depth.
Of all three parts in his book, I think I enjoyed the first one the most. Sobrino demonstrates considerable skill in analyzing the resurrection of Christ as a hermeneutical, historical, and theological problem, thoughtfully addressing the challenges that arise when approaching the topic from a critical or even skeptical perspective. Sobrino also uses this section to lay the groundwork for his main argument: that traditional Christology has often failed to adequately address the Kingdom of God and its profound implications for the marginalized. What I found most impressive about Sobrino’s approach here is that it felt very natural, and his points perfectly aligned with the material he cites, including biblical text and other theologians he uses to build his thesis, including Pannenberg, Rahner, Ellacuria, and Moltmann. When Sobrino addresses the historical problems surrounding the Resurrection, I found his approach genuinely refreshing. As an agnostic, I have often been unconvinced by the ways theologians and lay Christians discuss the Resurrection, finding their arguments problematic. However, Sobrino’s critical analysis casts these issues in a new light, offering much to consider and prompting deeper meditation. When Sobrino deals with the theological approach, his line of thinking becomes clearer, and his points are often quite powerful and profound as he re-centers the victims in his argument, making it clear that the Resurrection should be seen as an extraordinary act for liberation, and that liberation, although universal, has a specific, special meaning for the victims of history.
In the second and third halves of the book, Sobrino explores the titles for Jesus found in the New Testament, including “Messiah,” "Lord,” “Word,” and “Mediator.” Sobrino raises several compelling points in this section and further strengthens his argument by demonstrating how traditional Christology often simplifies the New Testament text, making it easier to overlook the victims within theological discourse. The third section is considerably denser, as Sobrino engages with complex and weighty theological issues arising from the early church councils and patristic writings. In particular, Sobrino recovers what he considers a lost thread from these councils: the relationship between suffering and salvation. He argues that this issue was not only transcendental, but also had material implications that were overlooked in early Christological formulations. Sobrino further explores how Christianity’s adoption as the official religion of Imperial Rome made it even more challenging to maintain a focus on victims. However, he argues that one council in particular, Chalcedon, did, in fact, reinforce several important theological points. Sobrino sees it as a holistic definition of Christ, and that the unity within it is salvation. “What saves is wholeness, not fragmentation, unity, not separation; reconciliation, not antagonism.” Essentially, what Sobrino is saying here is that the humanity of Christ was reaffirmed in Chalcedon, which should be seen as an important part of modern Christology. It is in the humanity of Christ that victims are re-centered, and the implications of that are not to be missed (particularly regarding the Kingdom).
The epilogue, “Memory and Journey,” is Sobrino at his finest. He stands out as one of the most moving theologians I have encountered, with his profound humanism and empathy evident throughout. In this section, Sobrino beautifully articulates that Christianity is fundamentally a faith of journeying through history. As he writes, “Christianity is, I believe, if one wants to stick with imagery, a religion of journeying through history… Christianity is certainly a religion of agape, but it is given hope, on the one hand, and called to account, on the other, by the very existence of victims.” Ultimately, for Sobrino, the Resurrection was a historical event that generated an active dynamism within faith. Just as God entered history to uplift the victims, Christianity must continue its journey as a liberating force for those who suffer.
Of all three parts in his book, I think I enjoyed the first one the most. Sobrino demonstrates considerable skill in analyzing the resurrection of Christ as a hermeneutical, historical, and theological problem, thoughtfully addressing the challenges that arise when approaching the topic from a critical or even skeptical perspective. Sobrino also uses this section to lay the groundwork for his main argument: that traditional Christology has often failed to adequately address the Kingdom of God and its profound implications for the marginalized. What I found most impressive about Sobrino’s approach here is that it felt very natural, and his points perfectly aligned with the material he cites, including biblical text and other theologians he uses to build his thesis, including Pannenberg, Rahner, Ellacuria, and Moltmann. When Sobrino addresses the historical problems surrounding the Resurrection, I found his approach genuinely refreshing. As an agnostic, I have often been unconvinced by the ways theologians and lay Christians discuss the Resurrection, finding their arguments problematic. However, Sobrino’s critical analysis casts these issues in a new light, offering much to consider and prompting deeper meditation. When Sobrino deals with the theological approach, his line of thinking becomes clearer, and his points are often quite powerful and profound as he re-centers the victims in his argument, making it clear that the Resurrection should be seen as an extraordinary act for liberation, and that liberation, although universal, has a specific, special meaning for the victims of history.
In the second and third halves of the book, Sobrino explores the titles for Jesus found in the New Testament, including “Messiah,” "Lord,” “Word,” and “Mediator.” Sobrino raises several compelling points in this section and further strengthens his argument by demonstrating how traditional Christology often simplifies the New Testament text, making it easier to overlook the victims within theological discourse. The third section is considerably denser, as Sobrino engages with complex and weighty theological issues arising from the early church councils and patristic writings. In particular, Sobrino recovers what he considers a lost thread from these councils: the relationship between suffering and salvation. He argues that this issue was not only transcendental, but also had material implications that were overlooked in early Christological formulations. Sobrino further explores how Christianity’s adoption as the official religion of Imperial Rome made it even more challenging to maintain a focus on victims. However, he argues that one council in particular, Chalcedon, did, in fact, reinforce several important theological points. Sobrino sees it as a holistic definition of Christ, and that the unity within it is salvation. “What saves is wholeness, not fragmentation, unity, not separation; reconciliation, not antagonism.” Essentially, what Sobrino is saying here is that the humanity of Christ was reaffirmed in Chalcedon, which should be seen as an important part of modern Christology. It is in the humanity of Christ that victims are re-centered, and the implications of that are not to be missed (particularly regarding the Kingdom).
The epilogue, “Memory and Journey,” is Sobrino at his finest. He stands out as one of the most moving theologians I have encountered, with his profound humanism and empathy evident throughout. In this section, Sobrino beautifully articulates that Christianity is fundamentally a faith of journeying through history. As he writes, “Christianity is, I believe, if one wants to stick with imagery, a religion of journeying through history… Christianity is certainly a religion of agape, but it is given hope, on the one hand, and called to account, on the other, by the very existence of victims.” Ultimately, for Sobrino, the Resurrection was a historical event that generated an active dynamism within faith. Just as God entered history to uplift the victims, Christianity must continue its journey as a liberating force for those who suffer.
May 29, 2022
Another stunner from Sobrino. In his first book, Jesus the Liberator, Sobrino analyzed the life of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. This book picks up from the death and resurrection of Jesus and analyzes the first few centuries of Christianity with a focus on the conciliar councils and creeds. Sobrino contextualizes everything through the view of the poor and oppressed of the world, the victims. He makes the argument that the reason the creeds were useful was that they asserted the humanity and divinity of Jesus but left them in tension, accepting the mystery. They were also harmful because they absolutized a construct of God that erased God's salvation and liberation from history in favor of specifying the attributes of God and Jesus, and erased the focus of Jesus' ministry, the Kingdom of God, from doctrine and practice. Sobrino argues that the way forward is to allow the poor and oppressed to serve as a constant critique of the creeds and praxis of the church.
October 20, 2014
Not my favorite sobrino, but a good addition to his catalogue, great reference for christology in general
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews